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November 7, 2016

Clinton’s River of Corruption

By JED BABBIN

If she wins, she’ll pick up where her predecessor left off.

Like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Illinois’s Big Muddy River carries its detritus downstream. It picks up about seven other tributaries, including the Arkansas and White Rivers that brought us Bill Clinton to form the wide Mississippi.

If you think in those terms and consider how wide and powerful the Mississippi is, you may be able to see how wide, deep, and powerful Hillary Clinton’s river of corruption can be.

Tomorrow, Americans go to the polls to choose the 45th president of the United States. That decision will determine whether the record of corruption and impeachable offenses begun by Obama will be widened, deepened, and accelerated by the constant flow of political and personal corruption that will comprise the Second Coming of Hillary, Bill, and their hangers-on.

But wait, many will say. There haven’t been any Obama scandals. There weren’t any bimbo eruptions or clear examples of bribery.

So what? But Obama’s scandals are far more important and damaging to America than were the occasions Bill was having oral sex with an intern while in the Oval Office.

The Obama scandals weren’t always indictable, but they are the most serious of impeachable offenses because they are offenses against the Constitution itself.

Describing only a few proves the point.

How many times did President Obama unilaterally amend the terms of his “Affordable Care Act” — Obamacare — without Congress enacting legislation to make the amendments part of the law? A February 2015 article by the Galen Institute listed 48 changes to Obamacare since it was enacted. Twenty-nine of them were made by Obama without congressional action.

Article I of the Constitution says that all legislative powers it creates are vested in Congress. The president, under Article 2, is sworn to protect and defend the Constitution and execute the laws passed in accordance with it. The president has no legislative power, but Obama exercised it. And Congress did nothing to stop him. It could have impeached him for these acts, but it was too chicken-hearted even to try.

Obama has acted in defiance of Congress in respect to several other laws. By executive edict, he has declared “waivers” and “exceptions” to laws that didn’t allow them. Among those laws are welfare reform work requirements, the immigration laws, and the “Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.” Impeachable? Of course. Stopped or reversed by Congress? Of course not.

Obama has made “recess appointments” to executive positions despite the fact that, as the courts have held, the Senate wasn’t in recess. Impeachable? Natch. Stopped, as a last resort, by the Supreme Court with barely a burp from Congress.

There are so many other scandals that have occurred under Obama, but one is particularly relevant to tomorrow.

Hillary Clinton’s use of her private, unsecured email system to confer with her staff on Top Secret matters was confirmed by FBI Director James Comey in July, destroying her claim that she’d never sent or received classified information. Long before that, I’d raised the obvious question of President Obama’s involvement in that crime.

It had to go like this. Hillary and her staff were using her unsecured email system exclusively. They — both she and the staff — had to be communicating with our intelligence agencies that way, which would have brought about a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot question from the intel folks. They would have had to have raised the obvious problem to their superiors up the line until it reached cabinet level. Why hadn’t Obama shut it down?

Simple. As we know now from the WikiLeaks dumps of the Podesta emails, Obama was using her “Clintonemail.com” address to communicate with Clinton. Some or all of those emails would have to have been classified. We know that Hillary’s top aide, Cheryl Mills, wrote to Podesta that the Obama emails had to be “cleaned up,” meaning they had to be concealed, erased, and “BleachBitted” out of existence.

In short, Obama is almost certainly as guilty of risking disclosure of America’s most closely held secrets as is Hillary, obvious felonies. That alone accounts for the FBI clearing her in July and for Attorney General Lynch’s actions to try to block the revived investigation as well as her insistence that the Clinton Foundation investigation go no further. Well, that and Bubba’s close encounter of the cover-up kind with Lynch on a Phoenix runway a couple of months ago.

All of that is a trickle of corruption compared to what’ll happen if Hillary is elected tomorrow.

Hillary, like Obama, will “amend” any laws she pleases by executive action. No one — certainly not our totally cowed congressional “guardians” — will stop her unless the courts can. She’ll block that by appointing faithful but radical liberals to the Supreme Court. Obeying and enforcing the law will be her Constitutional duty, but she won’t, for example, let the immigration law or national security stand in the way of her desire to import more than half a million “Syrian refugees” regardless of how many terrorists are among them.

America’s secrets will either be put up for bid (Special Sale! Donate ten million bucks to the Clinton Foundation in the next two hours and get the identities of three U.S. spies in your country and a bonus Special Intelligence/Talent Keyhole picture collection of your enemies’ military installations for free!) or just continue to use her unsecured emails. She’s used to it. It would be inconvenient for her to switch to a secure system, so let’s let her continue to have her maid print out secret information for her from the maid’s home computer.

I end with what the late Bill Safire wrote of Hillary twenty years ago when she was First Lady: “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady — a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation — is a congenital liar.”

Too many voters won’t remember that tomorrow. If she’s elected, Hillary’s river of corruption will be as wide, deep, and powerful as Old Man River.

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